Pathways to Manhood: The Military vs. the Gang

How to save our sons from self-destruction

PATHWAYS TO MANHOOD: THE MILITARY VS. THE GANG

How to save our sons from self-destruction

John Washington

When I entered Army basic training in 1963, in the heart of the Jim Crow era, I encountered something I had never seen before: black men who could not only tell white men what to do, but who had the authority to strike them.

This was at a time when the image of black men in America was embodied by Stepin Fetchit, one of the first black actors on screen in the early twentieth century (see Figure 1). He built his career portraying a slow-talking, shuffling, lazy, dim-witted black man, the caricature the country preferred to believe. Harmless, dependent, submissive to white authority: that was the image that defined black men in the American imagination.

Fig. 1: Stepin Fetchit

And this was also the old Army, long before professional drill sergeants in Smokey Bear hats and precision rulebooks. The philosophy of that Army was ruggedness: break men down, harden them for battle, and forge them into single-minded units. That was the institution I stepped into when the U.S. Army label was sewn onto my fatigue shirt. The cadre could kick the hell out of you, slap you upside the head, and curse your mother in the same breath.

What stunned me most, as a son of the South raised under segregation, was that black trainers could discipline white recruits just as they disciplined black ones. If that wasn’t a reflection of manhood, I don’t know what was. In present day America, no one would even think that it was odd for a black man to order a white man about, but back then, it was mind-boggling.

Yes, the harshness shook the seventeen-year-old me. But I could endure it because I saw in the Army a path toward full humanity and manhood. For me, the military became a way of killing the Stepin Fetchit image in a society that had left few doors open to black men. And most of all, the army had those paratrooper units.

And no, coming as it does from my centrist-left liberal mind, this is not another rant about “what whites have done to us.” It is about some of our failures that we refuse to confront as a people, particularly the failure to raise our children within stable families that emphasize discipline and reverence for learning.

When I graduated from high school, my options were limited: head north into uncertain inner-city life, attend a black college whose degrees opened only narrow professional prospects at the time, or follow the well-worn path of black men into the military. That route had existed since the Revolutionary War, and every war thereafter. Since even factory jobs and postal work were barred by racist laws, those were the realistic options as I saw them at 17, so I chose the Army.

At the time, a tough twenty-year military career seemed not only honorable but perhaps the highest stable plateau available to me. In my mind, the ceilings above our heads were permanent.

Today, those ceilings are gone.

The racism that lingers is real, but it is no longer codified in law in a way that automatically bars a disciplined person from opportunity. The legal shackles forged under slavery and reinforced by Jim Crow have been dismantled. Today, it is possible to become a mayor, a state senator, a scientist, a corporate executive, or even the President of the United States. If I had gone into a coma at 17 and awakened today, I would be in a state of utter disbelief at the opportunities opened to me and I know I would have chosen a college classroom. And that is what troubles this old soul: too many of us black people fail to recognize the new reality.

Instead, we are not producing the academic preparation needed to walk through those doors, as evidenced by our 12th graders’ failure rates,¹ which are higher than those of all other races. Too many young men cannot qualify for college admission or even score well enough on military entrance exams, the very road that once upon a time offered me discipline, structure, and manhood. Today, black women serve in the armed forces in higher proportions than black men, and recruiters often struggle to meet enlistment goals in inner-city black communities.

A black seventeen-year-old who lacks academic preparation, or who carries a criminal record, can end up worse off than I was, not because the system bars him by law, but because poor preparation and early mistakes have closed the doors before him.

The definition of manhood is no longer primarily about proving courage under fire. It is about competence in classrooms, professions, and the home. It means intellectual discipline, lawful conduct, steady employment, and responsible fatherhood.

Today, black male consciousness is still aware of the ghost of Stepin Fetchit and is determined never to embody that image. But when academic failure, lack of discipline, or criminal records block legitimate paths to manhood, the search for dignity can take a destructive turn. What remains then is a distorted substitute: the macho display of aggression, recklessness, and violence as proof of manhood.

Consider this stark reality: black males, roughly six percent of the U.S. population, commit over half of the nation’s murders each year, and around 93 percent of the victims are also black. When I bring up these numbers, many of my fellow blacks do not want to hear them, and I find myself censored. This is an especially painful issue for me, since three of my cousins have been murdered, all by black men.

Unfortunately, for some young black men who fail the newly opened routes to success, the road to recognition is no longer found in Army ranks but in gang affiliations. There is no academic testing for entry, and a criminal record can enhance entry credentials rather than be a disqualification. Socialization can resemble aspects of the military: camaraderie, hierarchy, identity, discipline, and bold expressions of manhood, but it lacks alignment with the broader social order or its constructive values.

Gang initiation rituals can resemble the rough initiation of old Army training—getting slapped around, proving toughness—but without the higher purpose, lawful structure, or civic responsibility that once defined honorable warriorhood. At the end of that path often lie only two destinations: the prison cell or the grave.

Law enforcement data from the National Youth Gang Survey show that gang membership is disproportionately concentrated among minority groups: about 46 percent Hispanic, 35 percent black, roughly 11 percent White, and about 7 percent other races. For too many young black men, this becomes a distorted avenue to manhood.

I confronted this issue personally when my son was 15. As a member of his high school football team, knowing he could earn a college scholarship, he would have no issues seeing himself as a full man. Yet he began gravitating toward a group of friends with no goals, no discipline, and no respect for rules. They were not a formal gang, just a cluster of “homies” drifting toward the lowest forms of street culture.

My wife and I lectured him constantly, but parental words alone were no match for the gravitational pull of peer influence. Our rules were violated the moment we turned our backs. His friends always had more knowledge of life than we did.

Then the phone calls from law enforcement began; they had nothing on him, but they warned that he was associating with youths who had committed violations. The breaking point came when a neighbor informed me that, during what was supposed to be an overnight football trip, my son had played hooky and secretly spent the night at one of those friends’ homes. That’s when the hammer came down.

No more lectures.

Since I had already established my authority with him when he was in diapers, as some fathers now fail to do, he initiated no rebellion. The old black family model, which was firm and integrated with two parents, reasserted itself.

I put him on long-term restriction for over a year. When he got off the school bus, he came directly home. If he went anywhere, it was under his older sister’s supervision. And I regularly shook down his room for contraband.

It worked.

Years later, after he graduated from college and landed his first job, earning manhood through intellect rather than violence, he called me one night to thank me. His job was at a juvenile detention facility. There, he was able to see images of himself when he was 15 in the worst potential manifestations—murderers, armed robbers, and carjackers. During that conversation, he listed several of his old friends who had taken the incarceration route.

The paternal discipline I imposed on my son is a solution to some of the problems we are experiencing as a race. But this will require reactivating the black family—mothers and fathers in all homes who are as serious about their role in socializing their children as black parents were during my childhood days.

---

John Albert Washington is an octogenarian who has earned his daily bread, first, as an Army paratrooper and then, later in civilian life, as a computer support technician, two careers from which he has now achieved a double retirement. In and around these occupations, he fed his family with janitorial work, factory labor, and long-haul trucking, while also managing the completion of 2 years of college during the journey. Though he is not academically credentialed, he feels his short school life expanded his ability to think broadly and enhanced his analytical thinking skills. As a center-left liberal, he holds firmly that values like family commitment, self-sufficiency, and personal responsibility are not merely conservative but also deeply liberal ideals. He has published in Quillette and has two previous articles in the Journal of Free Black Thought: “Black Culture and the Euro-American Collective Brain,” “Blaming Racism Won’t Cut It,” “The Unraveling of the Black Family,” “The Brother War,” and “‘Uplift Suasion’ vs. Dysfunctional Black Behavior.” He lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

1. The figures from the Nation’s Report Card must be extracted from the site’s Data Quick View.